Jake's View | Cyberport is still a joke 10 years later

It's no Silicon Valley yet, but Cyberport is making strides to shed its image as an ill-conceived government venture, and becoming a hive for promising young technology companies in the city.

I learned the truth about promising young technology companies in the city as an investment analyst years ago - shudder, horror. Run from them as fast as you can. How I wish I could take back those Buy recommendations I made on the likes of Atlas Industries and Conic Investments.

I can't say I hadn't been warned. If you are looking at industrials, go for the dull and simple stocks, older hands in the business had told me. The more boring the better. That's where the promise of the future lies.

Guru of the trade Peter Lynch of Fidelity Investment Management once put it this way: "I like the kind of company that any fool can run, on the grounds that sooner or later some fool will."

So when Donald the Bowtied proposed Cyberport in his 1999 budget speech, I think I had the immediate measure of this project, right from wincing at the proposed name - Cyber - which induced visions of teenage geeks absorbed in Japanese comic books. And I have never had occasion to change my mind, although Donald certainly has. The focus groups that were given the task of evaluating the idea after it had already been announced reported that they didn't see much point in it.

They said, for instance, that they didn't need a Cyberport technical library. They already had the Internet. They also didn't need shared laboratory facilities. Why give competitors an opening to spy on them? Nor did they value the technical support. Technology encompasses so wide a field of endeavour that no technical support was likely to be specific enough to be of any use.